Hacker News Reader

Comment by everyone | Hacker News Reader

I, and clients of mine, have a bunch of stuff on the play stores. google is going bananas recently, aggressively trying to delist every app it seems..

Every few months they force you to upload new builds that use the latest "api level" .. This change makes zero difference to how the app functions.

Its a massive pain updating them and I have let several apps lapse and be taken down cus I couldnt be bothered jumping though googles arbitrary hoops.

Which I guess is google's aim, and also that they are doing this to clear as much space as they can and save a small amount of money on storage, as part of their general enshittification process.

View on HN

> This change makes zero difference to how the app functions.

That's not true, different api levels have different restrictions and defaults even if you don't change any of your app code, that's why they force you to target a new api level.

For example, one Android 15 change is "Apps that target Android 15 must be the top app or running an audio-related foreground service in order to request audio focus.", or another one "For apps targeting Android 15, the `elegantTextHeight` `TextView` attribute becomes `true` by default".

It's not always a no-op. There's zero chance that storage costs are the concern here, they've long struggled to fix overly permissive APIs and poorly designed legacy APIs on apps that target old api levels.

"Every few months"?

Android has a yearly release to target a new API and this has been in place for quite some time, it's not really arbitrary.

Do I agree with it? Not really, but let's at least be honest with the time line -- and if you want to keep your apps available, the very least is a once-a-year update, shouldn't be that difficult...

It's similar to their optimization of the web for their customers. To remain indexed you have to jump through all their hoops which means you derive income and therefore are at least potentially an advertiser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com